WP Plugin : Sort Admin Menus
The dasboard menu can get very cluttered if you have lots of plugins installed on your WordPress blog. Many plugins add their own pages to the menu system and eventually it may turn out that some submenus are so long they barely fit on your screen anymore. What’s worse, the menu items are arranged “in no particular order”, which makes finding the necessary option tedious.
That’s why I wrote a small plugin that can sort the admin menus alphabetically. In the default configuration it will sort the menus that tend to be the most bloated – Manage, Settings and Plugins. You can change which menus are sorted by editing the plugin’s source code – it’s very simple and short.
Download Plugin
sort-admin-menus.zip (1 KB)
Requires : WordPress 2.5
Tested up to : WordPress 2.5.1
Additional Notes
This plugin should be compatible with any “dropdown menu” and “CSS menu” plugins. I’ve successfuly tested it with Admin Drop Fown Menu by Ozh and I’m fairly sure it will work with other similar plugins.
It’s largely a proof-of-concept thing. I could go all-out and make a full-fledged menu editor with drag & drop and whatnot, but I suspect nobody would care. So I wrote this simple plugin instead 😛
Related posts :
Subscribe via RSS
Get Updates by Email
(testing to make sure comments work with WordPress 2.6)
Love the plugin but i would love to see the full blown menu editor 🙂
@slee – That was my initial idea, but it doesn’t seem there’d be much demand from that (aside from you, of course). Plus an actual editor would be pretty hard to make.
I think you would be suprised i think many would want your plugin. it would be great to be able to properly change where each menu item was and possibly link that with a roles as well. for example i make a site for a client and i dont want them to see tags it wold be great if a – i could rid of the link altogether or b – move it and make it so the client cant see it so only admin see it something
Okay, noted. However, it’s still a complex task… I’ll keep it in my idea file for the time being 🙂
Make that 2 of us 😉
Make that 3 of us 😛
Okay okay, I’ll move it a bit higher in my to-do list 😛 I’ve got some other projects planned for the near future, but I might get around to this in November.
haha what have i started 🙂 keep us updated…
[…] basic idea for the plugin was suggested by several commenters way back in October. However, the internal menu system that WordPress uses is […]
Darn, was disappointed to find out this one doesn’t work with WordPress 2.7. Any plans to update the plugin?
Maybe eventually. Take a look at Admin Menu Editor, you can do nearly the same thing with it (though it’s not entirely stable).
Yep, went to your home page and just discovered you released the drag and drop version. Perfect timing. Already have it uploaded and will give it a shot.
Can you plz update this one for 2.7?
Oh well, okay. The update will be up in about 10 minutes. Download from the same link, or wait for the upgrade notification.
hi. Thanks for plugin
perfect.
Regards
Thanks WS!
Yeah, I’ve seen your comment that I could use the menu editor but that’s not what I wanted. I don’t want to load the menu editor every time I install a new plugin – I just want to leave it alone and know that my settings are always sorted, and this plugin is perfect for that.
The functionality is not duplicated by the menu editor plugin. However, you could integrate this whole plugin as an option in the menu editor.
Agreed. I was just being lazy 😉
Hey Shadow,
me again. I just realized something has been bothering me for a while and that is this plugin also sorts the Plugins submenus, which changes the default action when you click on the Plugins menu header to Add New.
Can you modify it so it only sorts submenus in the Settings or has options for what to sort?
Thanks,
Artem
Just remove ‘plugins.php’ from the $menus_to_sort array on line 27 of sort_admin_menus.php. The result should look like this :
$menus_to_sort = array('tools.php', 'options-general.php');